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Dear {{ first_name | reader }},
You've probably read foresight reports before. Most of them tell a growth story: new markets, new technology, new ways to make money faster than the competition.
Dubai Future Foundation's fifth Global 50 report, published in last month, is exactly that kind of document. Fifty opportunities, five megatrends, a methodology built for investors and innovators chasing what comes next.
Buried inside it is a section that has nothing to do with growth. DFF ran roundtables across geographies, sectors and expertise levels, and asked participants to sit with genuinely uncomfortable questions: what happens if global cooperation collapses, if social cohesion fractures, if energy, materials and governance all hit their limits at once. Those aren't opportunity prompts.
They're the kind of scenario a crisis, risk and emergency communication function should already be running as a tabletop exercise. Most aren't.
This edition takes DFF's own foresight tools — its uncertainty framework, its backcasting method, its four-role readiness model — and turns them back on the profession that's supposed to own forward-looking preparation in the first place.
Happy reading.
WAG THE DOG NEWSLETTER | ISSUE WEEK 33, 2026
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Three of the report's five "uncertainty" questions are unrehearsed crisis scenarios. DFF's roundtables produced "What if global cooperation becomes impossible?", "What if social cohesion breaks down?" and "What if we hit systemic constraints across energy, materials and governance at the same time?" — none of which most crisis functions have run as a tabletop exercise.
Only 9% of technology leaders have a post-quantum cryptography roadmap, even though DFF expects quantum computing to threaten current encryption within three to five years — a readiness gap the report treats as unremarkable and most comms functions haven't registered at all.
The 2024 Arup deepfake fraud cost $25.5 million and started with a fabricated video call, not a phishing email, a detail DFF uses to show how far synthetic-media threats have outpaced the playbooks built to catch them.
Backcasting, DFF's own foresight method, traces a future backwards to today's first step, and the report states this applies to undesired futures as much as desired ones. Most crisis planning still starts from a checklist of past incidents rather than a future nobody wants.
The report's four foresight roles — leader, anticipator, enabler, observer — sort organisations by how early they act, not by how much they know. Most crisis, risk and emergency communication functions default to observer: watching a signal until it's already the story.